Model for Skateboard Pavilion
Dan Graham
Model for Skateboard Pavilion, 1989
Architecture model Two-way mirror, aluminum, polyester-cast, painted light-grey and with graffiti, wooden floor, coated with sand and sawdust, painted green, particle board base, painted gray 206 x 145 x 145 cm
GF0000191.00.0-1995
Artwork text
Dan Graham is one of the most influential conceptual artists of his generation. Influenced by psychoanalysis and with a particular interest in social interaction, music, the everyday, and popular culture, since the 1960s he has explored architecture, film, video, and performance. Of key importance to the artist is the individual’s awareness of the self and others in social spaces. His architectural concepts manifest primarily in a series of pavilions where he uses glass, twoway mirrors, and other semitransparent materials to create spatial constellations facilitating self-perception and the perception of group dynamics. He describes the design for a skateboard pavilion created at the end of the 1980s as follows: Skateboard Pavilion, consisting of a large, cement,concave dish for skateboarding and a canopy of two-way mirror glass, a four-sided pyramidal form truncated at the top so that it is open, was first proposed for a ‘stopping point’ for the International Garden Year in 1993 in Stuttgart, Germany. It was not accepted, perhaps because the notion of a recreationalattraction primarily for teenagers was not thought to be a good idea. It works maximally when the skateboarder approaches the lip or top edge of the concave dish and looks up towards the sky / canopy and sees a combined kaleidoscopic reflection and transparent image of himself and the surrounding environment on the canopy form. The cutaway top produces a diamond-like image also projected on the two-way mirror canopy.”1 (Jürgen Tabor) 1 Dan Graham, “Skateboard Pavillon,” in Jahresring: Der öffentliche Blick, vol. 38 (1991): 200.